The present invention relates to an automation of a reception job at a polling station of elections, and especially to a method and apparatus for identifying a voter.
Conventionally, in elections of members of parliaments, governors of a metropolis, metropolitan prefectures and prefectures, assembly members of a metropolis and prefectures and mayors of cities, towns, and villages, a postcard is mailed to voters from local government that is used for a polling station ticket according to the law regulating election of public officials. A voter brings the postcard to a polling station and is identifyed to be an authentic voter with reference to a voters list. Receiving a voting paper, the voter writes a candidates name and casts a vote. When a plurality of election are performed at the same time, a plurality of voting papers are delivered on each of which a candidate name is written and are cast in different boxes. Ballot boxes are then brought to such a place as a gymnasium where ballot boxes are opened to count votes by human wave tactics and vote counting is then totaled.
In conventional voting described above, reception, voting and counting job are not automated and thus much time is spent in the vote counting. Especially in reception job in polling station, the following complicated job by man hand was necessary.
In the reception desk of polling station, voters hand the postcard to a staff. Based upon the address, name and other items of the voter on the postcard, the staff refers to the page of voters"" list where the voters"" names are listed, marks a check that the reception is over and handed a voting paper to the voter. In the past, many staff including a staff for reading the postcard, a staff for referring voters lists, and a staff for handing a voting paper performed such reception job.
It thus takes much time especially in referring voters list wherein the risk for staff""s check mistake was high. Moreover, as the voters list is divided into a plurality of sublists and are checked by a plurality of staffs in a polling station with many voters, retention of staff members and personnel expenses were problems.
Relating to the automation of reception job, vote casting or vote counting, the research and development has been actively carried out centralizing to the electronic voting systems and many techniques have been disclosed by patents and technical papers. In the electronic voting systems, voter identification job for preventing double voting or voting by other person is necessary. With respect to the automation of such job, various systems have been suggested. For example, in the Japanese laid open patent application No.6-119519, a voting and vote counting system is disclosed in which a magnetic card is used for identifying voters. In the systems, a terminal for voting reads a personal magnetic card in which information identifying a voter is recorded and is used only when the record coincides with the record stored in a memory device. The voter is identifyed by a voter""s portrait photograph attached to the magnetic card. Furthermore, personal computer checks the same voter not to double vote in the same election in the system.
The Japanese laid open patent application No.6-251049 also discloses a voting reception terminal in which a reader provided in a polling station to identify the voter reads a personal identification IC card owned by a voter. In the card, voter""s portrait data, finger print data together with personal data such as voter""s address, full name, date of birth, gender and age are recorded.
However, these conventional systems had drawbacks that reliability for identifying the voter is not adequate and the identification process is complicated. That is to say, in the voting system disclosed in the Japanese patent application No.6-119519, since identification of the voter is performed by a magnetic card with a portrait attached owned by a voter, the portrait and data are easily amended and changed, so that reliability of identification of the voter is not sufficient. Further, the Japanese laid open patent application No. 6-119519 discloses a voting reception terminal apparatus in which an IC card owned by a voter records personal data including portrait data and characteristic data of finger prints. With the apparatus, however, printing process of a finger print from a voter at polling station is troublesome and it is difficult to get agreement of voters since the process may cause a question of touching upon the human rights. Since the portrait data of a voter is recorded in IC card owned by the voter, there is also a possibility that the data is changed.
The present invention has been made in consideration of the above situation.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus for identifying the authentic voter with an easy checking process at the polling station.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus for identifying the authentic voter with high reliability.